So SF Signal led me to a review of a rather odd play with the provocative title (review title, not play title) “Why Are So Many Fictional Utopias as Terrifying as Dystopias?”
This is a subject I’ve touched on before. But the review’s author hits on something I haven’t touched on, one that should be seriously considered by any writer who wants to tackle a real utopian setting:
The issue with the audience’s conditioned expectations:
In watching this play, we bring in all of our abundant, engrained ideas of what lurks behind the copacetic veneer of utopia. For that reason, when a character (played by Catherine Brookman, who composed and performs all the soaringly layered music) disappears, it doesn’t seem a stretch to wonder if she was murdered by the leader.
This is despite the fact that the intent, and text, of the play in question is utopian. However, as Moze Halperin points out, we just aren’t used to real utopias:
False utopias — art’s favorite variety — tend to be more sinister even than dystopias, because they initially present themselves as Solutions. The key difference — the thing that makes these communities seem utopian at first — is that they’re typically extra-societal. Their sylvan or generally remote settings start by providing a sense of beauty and a return to simplicity, of de-corporatization and a sort of society-wide re-personalization. But that woodsy setting also soon reveals its happy micro-society to be a smaller version of exactly what went wrong elsewhere: notably, leadership as pure megalomania. The “personalization” created by the smallness of most utopias means that tyrants can physically govern — they can actually oppress people with their own bare hands. (John Hawkes’ Patrick, the leader of the Catskills cult in Martha Marcy May Marlene, for example, uses rape as an initiation ritual for the titular character — whom he also named as another assertion of his authority.)
And the woodland promise — the optimism of the marriage between humans and nature, of a return to nature as a symbol for wiping the slate clean — soon reveals itself to be a trap. In M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village and Lepucki’s California, the central communities have built spiky ramparts (The Village‘s in the form of a spiky “creature,” California‘s in the form of actual massive “Spikes” made from sharpened detritus of a former society) to keep residents in and the outside world out. The below-the-surface tyranny of “utopias” — insomuch as they’re often small and rural — is also in some ways more direct than in urban, bureaucratic dystopias. These two prevalent forms of nightmarish society in art are disheartening because they suggest that imagining anything better than the status quo will lead to one of two options: either living in an urban center controlled by labyrinthine forces (which represent extremes of the private of public sectors) put in place only to keep you oppressed, or moving to the woods, donning braids, and getting sexually assaulted.
While this only refers to one particular type of utopia (there are as many kinds of utopia as there are political philosophies philosophers) the point holds for all of them. How often, outside Star Trek, have you seen any fictional utopia and unconsciously primed yourself for the other shoe to drop, for the ugly secret to be revealed? So, if you make the attempt, remember that I’m not the only reader who’ll poke around your utopian society looking for the mass graves.
